"I am absolutely thrilled and wholly proud to be working with Rick,” Nettles said in a statement. “If you ask any musician who is on their producer ‘bucket list’, Rick would be on each and every one."

Rolling Stone reports Nettles wrote many of the songs on her own and co-wrote with artists well outside the country genre including Butch Walker and Sara Bareilles. The magazine reports Nettles has spent the last month in Malibu, Calif., working on the project with Rubin trying to capture her live sound.

"They're performances," she told the magazine of the songs she and Rubin have recorded together. "I love how human everything is. I've always wanted to capture the feeling of a live performance on a record, and this is as damn fine of an effort as I've ever done in that regard."

Jason Aldean’s personal trials don’t seem to be slowing down his career.

Aldean, who filed for divorce from wife Jessica on April 26, is not only leading a sold-out tour, but he also was just announced as a co-host for the CMT Awards with actress Kristen Bell on June 5 at Bridgestone Arena.

In addition, he’s signed on to perform alongside Aerosmith and James Taylor at a benefit concert for the victims of the Boston Marathon bombing. The concert is May 30 at TD Garden in Boston.

For his new album, "Get Me Home," Russ Irwin dug deep into the catalogs of classic rhythm and blues artists to find inspiration for his piano-powered rock and soul tunes. But the musician actually cut his teeth on classic rock - one of the first songs he learned to play on piano was Aerosmith's "Dream On."

Tyler jumped in on "Love" after hearing Irwin and Frederiksen's early version, and if it weren't for his input, the song could have gone to a country star.

"We were thinking it was for Tim McGraw," Irwin says. "And Marti was planning on giving it to him at some point. After we wrote the song, we knew it was a really strong song, and we played it for a bunch of people. Steven heard it and fell in love with it, and really wanted it to be an Aerosmith song."

Tyler was also game to lend his vocal stylings to "Get Me Home" - he joins Irwin on the funk and jazz-flavored "Crazy Too." Aerosmith guitarist Brad Whitford also appears on the album and the music video for its title track.

Irwin says the band has been very supportive of his solo career, and he gets to play solo gigs during Aerosmith's off-days on tour.

“It has actually been really very satisfying to have two projects happening at the same time," he says. "It’s very fulfilling. There’s no downtime, that’s for sure.”

How does a rock band keep the creative process fresh after being together for 42 years?

For his part, all Tom Hamilton had to do was step up to a microphone. Hamilton, bassist for arena rock veterans Aerosmith, says the band’s new album marks “the first time I’ve ever sung anything, period,” with his lead vocal turn on the bonus track “Up on the Mountain.”

“I guess I can check off a couple of lines on my bucket list,” he jokes.

“Music From Another Dimension” is the band’s first album of original material in 11 years and sees Hamilton and the rest of the rhythm section making their biggest return to the songwriting fold — which had long been handled by frontman Steven Tyler, lead guitarist Joe Perry and a stable of collaborators — since the ’80s.

It might also be the band’s last hurrah on record, and Hamilton says that made the input of all of its members a must.

“A lot of desire and demand within the band was growing, and so I think we all looked at this as something that could possibly be the last album we ever make, and realized that this album is going to be something that represented everything that we’d learned from making records since we started. If you listen to the record, I think you can hear every era of the band in it.”

The band is touring in support of their upcoming album "Music From Another Dimension," which hits stores on November 6 and features appearances from Carrie Underwood and musically inclined movie star Johnny Depp.

Tickets are $49.50 - $149.50 and go on sale Monday, September 24th at 10 a.m. at Ticketmaster.

Charlie Worsham sat still in an East Nashville studio while his producer, Ryan Tyndell, adjusted levels and ordered microphone tweaks.

This is the interminable part of recording, the part where creation halts and sonic minutia is the order of the afternoon. This is the stuff George Strait has ignored for the past 30 years, because ... well, because he’s George Strait and he doesn’t have to hang for the minutia. This is syrup-slow.

Worsham is a big picture guy, and he’s right. He’s sprinting as fast as he can, sometimes without moving a muscle.

He’s a lifelong-so-far musician who spent his single-digit years working on his banjo chops and preparing himself for his big-time debut. He played onstage at age 10 with King of Bluegrass Jimmy Martin at Ryman Auditorium. A Mississippi kid from a couple of hours south of Memphis, Worsham learned the fiddle and the guitar, emulating Martin, Marty Stuart, Earl Scruggs, Vince Gill and others. Worsham dreamed of Nashville, though that didn’t divert him from figuring out B.B. King solos, or from moving through Aerosmith and Def Leppard phases.

Anyone who ever doubted the transformative power of Bob Dylan's music need only look to Ke$ha.

Yes, Ke$ha.

Nashville's own irreverent pop star known for singing about brushing her teeth with "a bottle of Jack" turns poignant while covering a song from one of music's great lyricists on the new four-disc "Chimes of Freedom: The Songs of Bob Dylan Honoring 50 Years of Amnesty International." The project features 75 newly recorded Dylan songs by 80 artists, including Adele, Sting, Sugarland, Elvis Costello, hip-hop artist K'naan and others to support the human rights organization. The album will be available internationally on Jan. 30.

Ke$ha is one of the more unlikely stars to contribute to the compilation, released Tuesday. The pop star defined by party anthems like "Tik Tok" and "Your Love Is My Drug" took on Dylan's "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright." As she found herself alone in her bedroom for the first time in months, the words of the song - about a person bidding goodbye to a lover - took on a new, deeply personal meaning. She realized she was saying goodbye to her carefree, former life - before big hits and world tours brought on pressure and priorities. She broke down as she began singing, and the emotion is captured on the record.

Nashville resident and renowned rock songwriter and producer Desmond Child is nominated for three Latin Grammy awards: producer of the year, record of the year and song of year. The nominations are in recognition of his work as producer and a songwriter on Ricky Martin’s latest album, Musica + Alma + Sexo.

Child says he couldn’t be happier with his slew of nominations.

“It’s a thrill of a lifetime to be nominated for producer of the year, and also for record of the year and song of the year; that’s the Grammy trifecta,” he says. “I pray I can bring some of that Grammy gold back to my hometown, Nashville.”

Child will find out just how much Grammy gold he can claim during the 12th annual Latin Grammy Awards, which take place Nov. 10 at the Mandalay Bay Events Center in Las Vegas. The show will air live at 7 p.m. Nashville time on the Univision Network.